Ishita Mitra

My relationship with makeup has definitely wavered over the years. My mom only wears lipstick occasionally and didn't allow me to wear eyeliner until I was in high school (after years of begging) so I didn't really experiment a whole lot with makeup until I left for college. I had fun with it for a while, and I still do, but it's never been part of a consistent routine. I'm currently in graduate school and also student teaching, so when I do wear makeup lately it is mostly just in an attempt to hide how exhausted I feel most of the time #bags.

As a woman there's no end to the ways that you can be labelled as not enough. With regards to makeup, if you wear too much makeup you can be called high maintenance or shallow or narcissistic, and if you don't wear enough makeup you can be called frumpy or made to feel less attractive than those that do. There can be a myriad of unsolicited opinions that come your way regardless of what you as an individual actually care about, and it is hard to let all of that just slide off your shoulders and meet yourself in the mirror every morning feeling 100% confident. But I think what I really want for my life right now is the freedom to go about my day, able to meet every opportunity head on without any limitations within my own mind. Some days makeup might help with that and some days I'm happy to not wear it at all, but I think the underlying idea is that it's my choice and what I put on my face or how my face looks in general shouldn't dictate my worth as an individual.

We need to get rid of this idea that women should constantly be comparing themselves to other women or to what society holds up as the ideal woman. That's a huge source of insecurity, unhappiness and unnecessary judgement and we should all work to unlearn and remove that perspective from our foundation. I think part of unlearning that is really tuning in to your own sources of joy and building up your life around those sources. If someone, regardless of their gender, feels truly joyful when using makeup, that's empowering for them and I don't feel like it's mine or anyone else's place to comment on that.